Just gonna send Rachael’s excellent advice to young enquiring minds from now on. Make sure you click the “read more” button.
Sometimes I get emails from young people—young people younger than me! babies emailing babies!—who have questions about how I started writing and how they can start writing and what the hell they should be doing with themselves and their writing. I like replying to these emails. I like it because I was basically in that same position not that long ago (like, seriously, not that long ago at all) and I wish I thought to do what they have done—email someone who seems to have stuff figured out asking how they figured that stuff out—which seems so weirdly impossible, which is actually not impossible at all. It’s very possible. Mostly I wish I had done this because it took me a while to realize that people who seem to have stuff figured out often do not have stuff figured out. Anyway, here is most of an email I sent tonight to a soon-to-be-graduating person who wants to write.
